A group of staffers are working together to start a union at the Guggenheim Museum, Art News reports, and filed a petition with the institution this past week. “We want a voice at the museum because working conditions have deteriorated,” an anonymous worker at the museum says. “We want to be able to have our concerns taken seriously by management, and after raising them for several years and having them go unanswered, it feels like this is our only route. It’s not one being taken out of malice.” (more…)

A group of artists have written to the director of the National Portrait Gallery, calling for an end to its links with BP. “Either we distance ourselves from one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers and embrace the challenge of decarbonizing, or we continue to give legitimacy to BP and its business activities that are seriously exacerbating the problem,” says Gary Hume. (more…)

Rachel Whiteread has been named a dame of the British Empire, Art News reports, after her many years of groundbreaking work and her 1993 Turner Prize win. (more…)

South Africa’s Goodman Gallery will open a space in London this fall, part of a Cork Street gallery redevelopment. “For a gallery that has championed social justice for over 50 years, I feel it is important to play more of a front line role in shaping the discourse in the UK.” says owner and director Liza Essers. “At this time of heightened nationalist sentiment and populist politics, it’s important to reach beyond one’s own borders and arriving in the UK approaching Brexit is an interesting time.” (more…)

Cindy Sherman gets the profile treatment in The Guardian this week, as she opens a show at London’s National Portrait Gallery. “She’s the director, the producer, the set designer, the costume mistress, and the star as well,” says writer and editor Ingrid Sischy. “In her hands, images aren’t straitjackets but vehicles to show the infinite possibilities of who she could be.” (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, Smoker #23 (1976), via Almine Rech

As the days of summer swing into focus, and the weather grows ever warmer in Europe, the art world once again returns to the home of the Art Basel fair, which opens next week in the Swiss city, held in conjunction with a number of various exhibitions and shows across the city.  Closing out the first half of the year’s major market activities (save a major auction coming the following week in London), the fair offers a last look at the European art market’s health, especially as turmoil and political crisis continues to roil the continent.

Zoe Barcza, Love, Positivity, and DON’T Forget to Take Care of your Health! (2018), via Bianca D’Alessandro

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Sotheby’s is leading its June London Impressionist and Modern sales with Amadeo Modigliani’s Jeune homme assis, les mains croisées sur les genoux, 1918, with an estimate range of £16-24m.  (more…)

Bonn’s Bundeskunsthalle head Rein Wolfs has been chosen to fill the Stedelijk Museum’s directorship, Art News reports. “I grew up with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,” Wolfs said, “and I hope to provide the guidance and support needed to lead this museum, with its revolutionary history and fantastic collection, into the future.” (more…)

Joel Silver and Gagosian have settled their court cases over an $8 million Jeff Koons, with the Die Hard ultimately acquiring a 2013–15 Balloon Venus Hohlen Fels sculpture. The pair issued a statement that they were “pleased to have settled their lawsuit in New York state court. The claims and counter claims have been voluntarily dismissed.” (more…)

Miami’s Rubell Family Collection is moving to a 100,000 square foot space in Wynwood, and changing its name to the Rubell Museum.  “We were just looking for storage, and we wound up with this extraordinary space,” Mera Rubell says. “It was just too good to be storage.” (more…)

Matthew Ronay, Engorged Follicle (Corazonin) (2018), via Casey Kaplan

Sculptor Matthew Ronay kicks off his first show with Casey Kaplan this month in New York, Betrayals of and by the Body, a fitting intro to the artist’s expressive sculptural language and his vivid sense of space and form. An adventurous and inventive voice in modern American sculpture, Ronay’s work conjures a range of links and ties between biological processes and transcendent spiritual elements, cells, mandalas, limbs and devotionals are transformed into a fluid structural language. (more…)

Kehinde Wiley is profiled in the NYT this week, as he opens his new residency program, Black Rock, in Dakar, Senegal. “An artist can come here and have an experience that is at once about getting work done and about rigor,” he says. “But I think it’s also about being able to just spoil the artist and make them feel like they’re respected as thinkers and as part of the culture.” (more…)

Socialite and philanthropist Dede Wilsey is stepping down from her position as president of the board of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a position she has held for over 20 years.  “Dede is so much more than a checkbook,” Director Thomas P. Campbell said. “She has a steel-trap memory for things that happened decades ago — she’s an institutional memory vault.”  (more…)

Collector and Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton is reportedly the purchaser of Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen work Buffalo II (1964), which sold for a record-setting $88.8 million at Christie’s in New York this past month. The news was broken by reporter Jeremy Hodkin’s newsletter, Canvas.  (more…)

A visitor to the Lázaro Galdiano museum has helped identify a portrait of Rodin, previously attributed as an image of King Leopold II of Belgium. “I got to the last picture and thought I’d misread the caption, because I recognized who it was straight away,” says Luis Pastor, who first identified the painting.  “I love Rodin and have been to the Rodin museum in Paris a lot. I was obsessed with him as a student. I started Googling pictures of Leopold and thought ‘They do look like each other but that’s not Leopold.’” (more…)

A piece in Art News this week notes the increased competition outside the Art Basel fair between mega-galleries, auction houses and other dealers, as powerful figures battle for control of the city’s bustling crowd of art buyers during the week.  The piece profiles the published output and special exhibitions of galleries like Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian during the fair. (more…)

A piece in the Art Newspaper this week charts the ongoing conflicts at the Barnes Foundation, as an auction of material from the institution opens new wounds over the indenture of trust banning sales of works. “They don’t want to deal with what happened last time,” says alumnus Nicholas Tinari. “They’re shifting their mission, and I guess you like to do that as quietly as possible.” (more…)

Alex Israel, As It Lays 2, 2019 (Production still with Tom Hanks and Alex Israel) (2019), via Greene Naftali

On view at Greene Naftali’s exhibition space in Chelsea, the Los Angeles-based artist Alex Israel has put forth a selection of new works and a collection of videos that reflect on his practice idolizing and reflecting the dizzying landscape of the Californian metropolis. Trafficking in the seductive, aspirational imagery that characterizes his hometown, Israel’s practice regularly draws on the aesthetics and iconographies so often reserved for commerce and Hollywood, and turns them towards a sort of suspended sense of both propduction and self-mythologization. (more…)

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise has closed the branch it opened in Chinatown, saying in an email announcement, “We will miss the space and our neighbors.”  (more…)

Marlborough Gallery is planning an expansion in Chelsea, which will consolidate the gallery’s various brands under one roof, Art News reports. “In today’s globalized market, the geographically-specific programming of the individual galleries no longer seems viable,” says Max Levai, who will supervise the new flagship. (more…)

Dr. Carmen Bambach, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has criticized Christie’s for suggesting she had attributed Salvator Mundi to Leonardo Da Vinci. “I have not wanted to answer because I do not want to be listed among people that said ‘yes’ because I wasn’t really asked what I thought about the Salvator Mundi at the time,” she says. “If my name is added to that list, it will be a tacit statement that I agree with the attribution to Leonardo. I do not.” (more…)

Paula Cooper now represents artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia M. Gary, and will open a solo show there in spring 2020. “Ja’Tovia demonstrates a remarkable and incisive ability to explore ways in which place and time define our bodies and self,” Senior Director Steve Henry said. “Using a broad range of techniques including animation, documentary, and narration, she creates potent, and often unsettling collages of images and sound. We are ecstatic to be working with her.” (more…)

Hartley Waltman will serve as general counsel of the Americas for Phillips auction house, Art News reports. CEO Edward Dolman says Waltman “brings with him considerable expertise, sharp judgement, and a long track record of successfully negotiating high value art transactions and resolving complex disputes.” (more…)

Josh Smith, Emo Jungle (Installation View), via David Zwirner

Marking his first solo presentation with David Zwirner Gallery this month in New York, painter Josh Smith has unfurled a sprawling body of new work at the gallery’s Chelsea exhibition space, bringing together a range of new graphical gestures and classic explorations in pursuit of an ever-evolving visual language. (more…)